


everyday is like Sunday

by Sarah T (SarahT), SarahT



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 18:27:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9397589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/SarahT
Summary: Mycroft wasthirteen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the Spike for beta.
> 
> Spoilers for all of S4.

The third time they find Mycroft trying to wrench one of the windows open in the middle of the night, Matron brings him in for a chat with Headmaster. 

“Everything all right, Mr. Holmes?” he inquires.

“Yes, sir,” he mutters, staring down at the sleeve of his pajamas. The fingernails on his right hand are all broken; one has been torn through into the quick.

“Your roommate says that you were crying out in your sleep.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir.”That is almost true.The _precise_ shape of the terror had slipped away as he stood there with his hand braced on the sash, leaving him only the sense that Sherlock had been playing below on the Musgrave grounds, oblivious to some great peril.To find himself staring down at the Park’s equally ample but deserted lawn instead was both a relief and a mortification.

“It can be challenging, being a new boy,” Headmaster says.“But Mr. Hals rightfully objects to being subject to a draft at midnight.”

“It won’t happen again, sir.”

He doesn’t keep that promise, not exactly; he only learns how to strangle the cries in his throat until he comes back to himself with his forehead pressed against the cold glass.

  


At half-term, in the new house, Sherlock is his small glum ghost.Mycroft is so glad to see him, alive and unharmed from hour to hour, that he almost forgets to be annoyed by the lack of privacy and the constant demands for his attention.He lets Sherlock conduct experiments in his room while he works.At night, he reads aloud whatever Sherlock brings to him until he falls asleep, curled against him.At first, Mycroft tries carrying him back to his own bed for the night, but Sherlock’s bedroom door doesn’t lock.He returns to try the handle again and again all night, allowing him precious little sleep.So he gives in and lets Sherlock remain.

On the last night, carelessly, he accepts Sherlock’s proffer of _Treasure Island_.Sherlock grows tense as he reads, and when he finishes the fourth chapter, he feels a small sob escape him.

“What’s the matter, Sherlock?”He doesn’t dare look at him.

“I miss Redbeard,” he whispers.“When’s he coming back?”

Their parents have never provided much in the way of spiritual instruction, but Mycroft has done a great deal of reading this term about the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.He has no doubts.“He’s gone, Sherlock.He’s not ever coming back.”

“But I miss him!”

Sherlock is flushed with tears.Mycroft isn’t sure what it means to miss anyone but Sherlock, which is an irremediable condition.He tries the only comfort he knows.“You remember him, don’t you?”

“Yes.But he’s not here _now_.”

“Well, since he’s in your mind, he can be with you whenever you want.However you want.You can play all night if you want to.Just close your eyes and think of where you used to see him at Musgrave…”

Sherlock dutifully shuts his eyes, and Mycroft is rewarded with a tremulous smile.“In the field…”

“That’s right.”

“Redbeard!Avast, ye scurvy dog!I’m coming to get you!”

While Sherlock mumbles, Mycroft subsides into the pillows, closes his own eyes, and piles stones to block up the abandoned Roman cistern, hiding the view of the small pale form floating face-down on the surface of the water.

  


Back at school, Mycroft starts to lose weight.He’s not trying to.He’s annoyed at himself for doing it.Amongst boys, the only thing worse than being in a despicable state is to be seen to be trying to _change_ that despicable state, and he knows it.But the simple enjoyment he used to take in his meals and the many little treats Musgrave always had to offer has vanished, and without that, the cutting up, chewing, and swallowing of food seem a grotesque and appalling series of tasks.

He’s first in all his classes.This does not improve his popularity.There’s nothing to be done about it.The classes aren’t even a distraction, though he likes Greek, likes the way the alphabet suggests the English, but one safe layer of abstraction away.He lies in bed and memorizes great swathes of Smyth’s _Grammar_ : _The genitive may denote a whole, a part of which is denoted by the noun it limits.The genitive of the whole may be used with any word that expresses or implies a part…In poetry this use is extended to positive adjectives: Ἀριδείκετος ἀνδρῶν_ conspicuous among men, _ὦ φίλα γυναικῶν_ O dear among women. _In tragedy an adjective may be emphasized by the addition of the same adjective in the genitive: ἄρρητ᾽ ἀρρήτων_ horrors unspeakable _._

He starts to see the school as a grand prison to which he and the other boys have been condemned for offenses too terrible to mention.It makes him analyze the security, develop plans for escape.They are careful, but not nearly careful enough.The first time he does it, he spends the whole night riding the buses, mesmerized by the dull yellow light, dreaming in the endless streams of information.

Euros is sitting across from him.She’s wearing an odd smock, like a nurse.“Do you miss me?” she asks.

He fights to stand up, assert his height advantage, but he’s panicked, heavy with sleep paralysis.Even imagining the motion of his limbs takes enormous effort.

“You don’t.”

“No,” he gets out.

“I see.”

She’s gone in the refraction in the window of the sun coming up over the Thames.Mycroft barely makes it back to school before breakfast.

  


Over Christmas, Sherlock seems a little more cheerful.Mycroft is glad.He’s invested all his pocket-money for months into presents for him: books and sweets and a telescope.Mummy looks at the pile of gifts and tuts, but doesn’t object.

On Christmas Day itself, Mycroft deduces all his own presents, but pretends to be surprised by each.The new pajamas are good quality, at least, and fit him better now than the pair he’d first taken with him to Harrow.Sherlock, of course, tears through his, each better than the last, and the last immediately being forgotten.This year, Mummy has put up an extraordinary and uncharacteristic profusion of decorations. She starts Christmas dinner in a haze of fairy lights in the dusk.Mycroft and Sherlock sit at the kitchen table, Mycroft with a new book of crossword puzzles and Sherlock with a piece of paper he’s busily drawing on.Mycroft listens to the goose roasting—Mummy’s cooking it at too high a heat—and with his eyes narrowed to concentrate on the clues can almost pretend that they’re at Musgrave.

“Sherlock,” he murmurs absently, “what are you drawing?”

“Redbeard.”

Alarmed, Mycroft sits up to get a look at the paper.He doesn’t see the horrors he’d briefly envisioned, but what he does see, he doesn’t understand.He frowns.“Sherlock, that’s a dog.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says, sounding puzzled at his stupidity.“Redbeard.”

Mycroft glances at Mummy.She is mashing potatoes while reading a math text she’s propped on the cookbook stand. Apparently, she’s heard nothing.“You named the dog Redbeard?”

“Well, that’s his name.”

“I…see,” he manages.

“ _I_ think it’s a _lovely_ drawing,” Mummy says, and Mycroft jumps to find her so near.She leans over to kiss Sherlock on the forehead, and he squirms away, protesting, “Mummy!”

“Now clear out and give Mummy some space, Mycroft, I have to chop onions.” 

He obeys, taking his book to the living room couch.Across from him, there’s a photo in a silver frame on the mantelpiece, Mummy and Daddy and Mycroft, holding baby Sherlock with a determined expression.They’re in the smaller drawing room at Musgrave.It’s like a window into a box that unfolds around it as Mycroft gazes: he can see the entire room, the vaulted ceiling, the Georgian Gothic Revival chairs and sofa, the angle of the sun and the pattern of the clouds in the sky outside the window.He can see it perfectly but he can’t reach any of it and he can’t make it any different to ease the ache in his chest. 

He’s always tried to instill a strict fidelity to reality in Sherlock—at least to the degree he’s capable of it—but this is the last game Sherlock can possibly play with Victor.Perhaps he should let it be.

  


Compulsory sports in spring term means fencing. Mycroft likes the ceremony of it, the uniforms, the archaic jargon, the prescribed patterns of attack and defense. Mr. Genever, one of the younger beaks and more fit than most, tells the team, "Boys, fencing will teach you a very important lesson. Life is war, but it's always possible for you personally to be a gentleman."

Mycroft already knows that there's nothing gentlemanly about war, but thinks it could be soothing to be able to pretend otherwise for a little while.

The first time another boy lunges at him with the rapier, though, he comes out of guard and jerks away. 

There's harsh laughter from the other boys. Mr. Genever calls across the salle, "Mr. Holmes, you will never solve your problems by running away from them."

Mycroft looks at the grinning, distorted face of his opponent. _Conium maculatum_ would paralyze him, but not kill, leaving him fully conscious as Mycroft sliced open his chest cavity. 

He lets that image play out.Down the sternum from the jugular notch, layers of skin and fat being peeled back, pectoralis major, white bone, until he's calm enough to rejoin the drills.

"How pretty," Euros murmurs in his ear.

He starts and, hastily, guilty, reassembles Kensington-Smith’s ribcage.

  


Home again for the Easter holidays; the cottage seems to be getting less, rather than more, familiar with time.Mummy and Father have finally got round to inviting the neighborhood over for a little party.He deduces each guest as he or she walks through the door, but keeps it to himself.He tries not to fidget or scowl as the cycle of _“Are these your children?”“These are my lovely boys, Mycroft and Sherlock_ ” repeats, each time making him queasier.At least the neighbors largely prefer to try to make conversation with the charming seven-year-old, rather than the ungainly boy on the verge of adolescence that he knows is what they see.But then Sherlock manages to absent himself while Mycroft is dutifully reciting stories of school life to an Old Harrovian.One of the guests has brought along a little girl around Sherlock’s age, brown-haired and bright-eyed and chattering at the top of her lungs.That’s finally too much for Mycroft, who mutters something to Mummy about feeling ill and escapes to the back garden.

Sherlock is lying full-length in the mud, staring into a puddle through a magnifying glass.

“Sherlock, Mummy’s going to have a fit when she sees your clothes.”

“Oh.”Sherlock looks back at himself.“Well, I can’t help it now, can I?I might as well keep on.”

Mycroft laughs.Sherlock goes back to his inspection.He looks completely rapt in his work, comfortable in his surroundings.Mycroft wonders if he’s happy.

Impulsively, he says, “The East Wind’s coming, Sherlock.”

His breath catches as soon as he says it and he wishes he could take it back.This is the joke-that-is-not-a-joke, the game-that-is-not-a-game, the code that means: _Go find Mummy or Father NOW and stay with them until I tell you it’s safe._ Just uttering the phrase seems to plunge the sun into lead-grey cloud, to make the mud beneath his shoes drag at his feet.

Sherlock lifts his head at once, looking troubled, but then the expression is displaced by puzzlement.“No, it’s not, Mycroft,” he says.“The wind’s in the west.”

This is, after all, true.The East Wind is gone.He sits on the step, pulling his blazer around him against the raw early spring, and watches Sherlock puzzling away at his world within a world.

“Mycroft,” he asks after a few minutes, without looking up, “are you crying?”

“No,” he says gruffly, and, in fact, he’s nearly finished.

  


Musgrave is awful, cut open like one of those children’s books where you could lift away a flap to reveal the inside of a building.Wind and rain have carried on the work the fire began.Seven different species are nesting in the navigable portions of the first floor alone.It’s plain they will never come back here.

He doesn’t go to find the overgrown cistern.There’s no need to see with his eyes what he’s reasoned out so carefully over so many tortured hours.Instead, he stands at what used to be the back door of the kitchen and pulls a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket.He still coughs on the first drag every time, but they do something to damp down the ridiculous mechanical action of his nerves that has otherwise operated beyond his control all year.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting.

After a while, he hears footsteps, and it’s a credit to the nicotine that he doesn’t jump, merely waits some more.Shortly, Uncle Rudy, his mother’s rarely-visiting brother, turns the corner of the building into view.He’s a tall man, with thinning fair hair cut close to the scalp and a military bearing.His eyes rove over the landscape with a careful, purposeful thoroughness.Uncle Rudy, Mycroft thinks now, does not have the job he says he does.He grimaces and starts to stub out the cigarette.

Uncle Rudy leans against an old stone folly.“Don’t put that out on my account.”

Mycroft can’t think of anything to say.

“James Genever called me.Hoping to avoid a full-blown crisis.”

“I wasn’t running away,” Mycroft says.“I should have had another six hours before anyone noticed.”

“Never underestimate the role of luck in your affairs.”He pauses.“James says your mind is absolutely brilliant.This wasn’t.”

Mycroft concedes mentally that he’s probably correct, but doesn’t see the necessity to say it out loud.The only person he admits errors to is Sherlock, and that only out of methodological rigor.

“She’s never getting out, Mycroft.It’s the bleakest prognosis possible.She’s absolutely untreatable.”

“I know.”

“Yes,” Rudy says, and now that assessing gaze is on him.“You knew before any of us, didn’t you?”

He nods.He knew all along, and it didn’t help.It’s astonishing how little knowing can help.

“Isn’t that funny,” Euros smirks.

“Shut up,” he tells her, and her eyes narrow.

“There’s nothing for you here, Mycroft,” Rudy says, oblivious to his internal monologue.

“Nothing for any of us,” he says.He looks at the sky, sees showers of sparks and ashes.They’ll float down around him forever.“Let’s go.”

  



End file.
